Image courtesy of Gary Garvin.
There are small problems that vex as much as they intrigue us, whose answers only lead to larger questions.
Mies van der Rohe’s Brick Country House, conceived in 1923 or 1924, is an early piece that anticipates his later work, presenting ideas about architectural forms and construction considered visionary at the time. While it was never actually built, the Country house is very well known – it’s often reproduced and helped establish his reputation. Almost all that remains now is a couple of charcoal drawings – a three-dimensional sketch, and a floor plan.
Mies van der Rohe's sketch of the Brick Country House, aka Brick Country Villa. Image via "5 Projects: Interview 5 - Alex Maymind" on Archinect.
It’s the drawing of the floor plan that has most captured attention. It reflects aesthetic interests of the time, Cubist ideas about space, and is a work of art in its own right, reminiscent of De Stijl paintings.a work of art in its own right, reminiscent of De Stijl paintings.
The image has the concise, complex grasp of an ideogram that opens up the world. It appears on the cover of the third edition of William Curtis’s Modern Architecture Since 1900, serving as gateway to the subject. Records of the project, however, are sketchy. It may only have been a conceptual work on paper, but there is some evidence Mies once had plans to build it for himself. Both drawings circulated widely throughout Europe at modernist exhibitions and, later, in the United States.
Mies van der Rohe's sketch of the Brick Country House, aka Brick Country Villa. Image via "5 Projects: Interview 5 - Alex Maymind" on Archinect.
The project was a step towards Mies’s goal "to bring Nature, houses and people into a higher unity”*. He broke the convention of orderly, enclosed boxes for living. As he says:
In the ground plan of this house, I have abandoned the usual concept of enclosed rooms and striven for a series of spatial effects rather than a row of individual rooms. The wall loses its enclosing character and serves only to articulate the house organism.**
Organism is a term as ambiguous as it is resonant. The rooms flow into each other without clear definition of their boundaries or their separation from the exterior, as they do in his Barcelona Pavilion built a few years later. The influence of Frank Lloyd Wright is obvious and was acknowledged.
He uses the traditional material of brick, and some forty years later Werner Blaser, under Mies’s supervision, drew a floor plan that showed the placement of each brick and the overall The rooms flow into each other without clear definition of their boundaries or their separation from the exteriorcoursework. As Blaser says in his book,Mies van der Rohe: The Art of Structure, "the groundplan of the brick house is a good example of the manner in which Mies van der Rohe developed the art of the structure from the very beginning. The structure of a brick wall begins already with the smallest divisible unit: the brick."***
That cannot be true as you consider the first rough drawing. But as Kleinman and Duzer suggest, the drawing and Blaser’s comment form a statement that, long after the fact, with his reputation well-established, helped clarify and fix Mies’s method for the critics and historians.
Image courtesy of Gary Garvin.
I assume in my model (pictured above) there are patios beneath the cantilevered parts of the roof. The two parallel walls in the largest room, close together, near the top, most likely enclose stairs to the upper floor.
The walls and the areas they suggest give a sense of internal involvement, denser, more enclosing, more defined in the compact rooms on the right, that opens through the narrow middle section out to the rest of the house—and beyond. Little is in line with anything, and there is an energy in the overall plan that never settles. But the plan is not chaotic. Rather, it shows a precise, asymmetric logic where control is never lost. It is the outside walls, which do not intersect at a common point, that give the house its greater energy and suggest extension that, theoretically, since their lines run to the edges of the drawing and look to go further, might be endless. The plan presents a picture of a mind asserting itself, opening up to the universe.
Image courtesy of Gary Garvin.
While the three-dimensional drawing is only a preliminary sketch, there looks to be no place for trees or other landscaping, which would be disruptive to the horizontal character of the house. Nature has been rendered as a sheer plane. The effect is orderly, serene, even breathtaking—and solitary and chilling.
Practically speaking, with the closings and barriers removed, the design encourages an open way of living, with full visibility and the chance for common interaction among the inhabitants. The rooms on the right might be utility rooms or, if privilege is involved, living quarters for servants. Or they might provide working space for the owner, removed from the rest of the house for concentration. The narrow middle section could be a library or casual den. The rooms on the left allow more formal social functions, dining and gatherings. The second floor, since separate and private, might have bedrooms and other rooms for repose and intimacy. The only indications Mies wrote on the floor plan, however, are the general designations “living space” and “service space.”
Image courtesy of Gary Garvin.
To pursue the building from a practical standpoint, however, is to hazard getting lost or running into conundrums. It is not clear what is front or back or where the main entrance is, if there is one, or how the house might communicate with the rest of the world, as these distinctions have been put aside in the larger scheme. Such distinctions might not matter or even make sense, however, in a home in the country, and perhaps Mies wanted a house that maintained the openness of the setting and its lack of orientation while avoiding the conventional formalities of entry and exit. There is no overt pretension in the facade, if we can find it.Nature has been rendered as a sheer plane. The effect is orderly, serene, even breathtaking—and solitary and chilling.
The exterior walls are intriguing. The only way to move through the three outside areas they create would be through the house. Also they exert complete domination of the estate, with all that might imply. They would mean three separate yards, though for what purposes I can’t imagine and I’m not sure Mies intended different uses. They provide division but not functional definition.
Image courtesy of Gary Garvin.
The drawings are only initial sketches, and changes would have been made were the house built. I don’t know how revision might be done, though, without diminishing the overall concept and effect. The outside walls, however long practically they might have been made, are vital yet the most problematic. Or maybe it is a only concept piece. If we assume hypothetically Mies did build the house for himself we would have to explore his life and mind to bring the building to final form.
The three-dimensional sketch has a wide perspective with a low horizon and vanishing points well off the visible picture plane; I assume to give the building the horizontal cast Mies wanted. The upper room on the right is especially hard to read. Nor does the sketch match the floor plan in all aspects. It may have been drawn before the floor plan, nor is it certain Mies himself even drew it. In building the model I stuck to the floor plan for walls and openings on the first floor and used the sketch for overall appearance. I wanted to maintain the horizontality, so I kept the walls low. It was intended, I think, to be a spacious home.
Image courtesy of Gary Garvin.
There is no plan for the second floor or any view of the rest of the building. Thinking about this floor in conventional terms ran me into all kinds of problems and felt like a violation. So instead I followed guidelines of design, maybe concept, and not use, suggested by the two drawings: structurally, the walls provide support points for a reinforced slab that forms the base of the floor, though I’m not sure my design is structurally sound. Doubts, however, were raised at the time about the building’s structural integrity as shown. The second floor should be contained within the borders of the first and not extend beyond. Like the first, it should be composed of free-standing walls and openings floor to ceiling. It should provide several openings for light and view of varying widths and keep the dynamics of the open design.what assumptions Mies made about art and the world, and whether they are valid and vital
Again, almost nothing is aligned in the first floor except the exterior wall at the top with the house's wall past the large patio. This reinforces the influence the extending walls have on the overall energy of the plan. In my design for the second floor, I made the back wall of the back room on the second floor align with the bottom exterior wall, for the same reason.
I also added that room to give the floor some width to better fill and integrate the whole building rather than have a narrow, isolated floor on top of the first. I decided it did not make sense, formally or practically, to have windows at the back of the floor overlooking the greater span of the roof, although I see alternatives to my placement.
Image courtesy of Gary Garvin.
The enclosure should suggest and complement the first floor, and have some complexity but not repeat its forms. My second floor, as is apparent from the overhead picture below, provides a complex shape that echoes its length and provides offsetting variety. That it's set at a right angle to the first reflects the cross shape of the exterior walls, reinforcing their influence and adding another degree of tension.
The first floor has overlapping squares and rectangles, these suggested but not completely defined. Study could be made of them, of their proportions and relationships, to find a pattern that, once understood, might provide a key for the second.
I only made a quick, tentative effort, without result. I have no basis for this whatsoever, but in order to maintain the open relationship with the outside I decided there would be a door or doors on the floor and continuous walking space on the roof around the exterior.
Image courtesy of Gary Garvin.
A window or door is not marked on the original floor plan or in Blaser’s drawing for the opening next to the exterior wall, seen above, so I left that space open, providing internal penetration and allowing protected entry. Possible second floor plan:
Image courtesy of Gary Garvin.
The black tiles represent where the stairs enter the second floor. As in the first floor plan, doors and windows have not been placed.
I have no confidence I got anything right and am curious how others might complete the house. How the conflicts between design and construction might be resolved; how his thoughts of an open way of life might have suited his contemporary society or the lives of those he imagined living there in the future; what such a life might actually be like and whether it is worthwhile; what assumptions Mies made about art and the world, and whether they are valid and vital; what architects might take from the house now; what they would reject, and why; what their own assumptions are when they design, and whether they have validity or vitality—all these questions remain open and linger.
An earlier, more speculative version of this essay, appeared on the author's blog Under Construction, as"Mies van der Rohe: The Brick Villa".
End notes:
*Wolf Tegethoff,Mies van der Rohe: The Villas and Country Houses(MIT Press)
**Jean-Louis Cohen,Mies van der Rohe(Taylor and Francis)
***Kent Kleinman and Leslie Van Duzer,Mies van der Rohe The Krefeld Villas(Princeton Architectural Press)
Other sources:
Toshimasa Sugimoto, Department of Architecture, Hiroshima University, has made 3D CAD renderings of the house with a different interpretation, which can be found here.
Alex Maymind references the Mies drawings and others related in"5 Projects: Interview 5 - Alex Maymind,",his proposal for a public art institution.
Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst,Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography(University of Chicago Press) provided many of the factual details.
